On Invitations”¦

Now that cousin P (who’s the only guest I know reads this blog) has her invite, it’s time for the rest of you to see them.

Several months ago, while I was still under the delusion that I could DIY our invites, I got some nice brown paper to try some mock ups. Eventually I got lucky and on my July visit to the US, found some very nice printable invites from Gartner Studios at Target:

I snatched two packs of 50 (because we’re sending about 100 invites). It turned out that the invites are almost identical to the paper I had in mind:

Mock up paper (left), Gartner Studios invite (right) How fitting!

So I just downloaded the template (which is an MS word doc) and wrote on it. I’m a cheap simple girl, hive, so I didn’t buy any fancy fonts and only used the ones available on MS Word, kidnapped Mr. Toadstool’s color printer and ended up with this:

Fun fact: In the Spanish version we had to change “friend” to “soul mate” because the word friend in Spanish has to imply a he or a she, so it’d be either me saying it about Mr. T or vice versa.

And the reception card:

It’s customary here to have a separate card to tell people about the reception, because there you include how many seats you’re saving for them (aka how many people are actually invited).

I didn’t include the “We have X seats saved for you” on our English invitations because we have a rough idea of how many are coming anyway, and if there are some extra additions we’ll know beforehand.

And a map, because the venue is a little outside the city and we want people to find it:

The map is the only thing we added that was not included in the Gartner’s suite. I printed it on a nice, thick-ish, ivory paper I bought at Office Depot.

I spent days making this map, not because it’s difficult, but because I am (or think I am) a perfectionist and apparently I had to trace every single street on the original map.Tthe thing is I made great part of the city (at the bottom), but ended up cropping it due to space. Fail!

Front and back

Yes, I have a bit of an obsession with maple leaves, I’ve always had, and spending time in Canada’s autumn only fueled it (again, we don’t have autumn here), but since I am we are looking for an autumn vibe to this wedding, it fits.

The English ones were the first ones we printed because we had to send them first, but I eventually made the font bolder for the Spanish ones. It looks better that way.

So, there you have it, hive—the Toadstool invitations for less than $90. Less than a month to go!

Did you go the DIY route with invites? Would you consider printable invitations?

Those look great! I’m a big fan of elaborate invitation suites, but for something more simple (and cost-effective), these are fabulous! I’ll have to keep Target in mind in case I get burned out on DIY and need a good starting point.